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Lidiia Ginzburg's Notes of a Blockade Person: Self and Others as Polyphonic Chorus
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Lidiia Ginzburg's Notes of a Blockade Person: Self and Others as Polyphonic Chorus Mallika Ramdas Ginzburg's blockade memoir, Notes of a Blockade Person (Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka), is part of a long list of Russian texts that document Russian experience under extreme conditions- civil war, the siege of Leningrad, state terror, prison and forced labor campsl Like many Russian women's autobiographical texts, Ginzburg's, too, is characterized by its compulsion to witness and by its foregrounding of others2 This paper traces Ginzburg's use of multiple personae and voices in Notes of a Blockade Person as a strategy of simultaneous self-assertion and self-effacement. The text's polyphony enables Ginzburg to demonstrate her belief that individual actions lead to communal survival in extreme conditions, and to study human behavior under conditions of war and starvation. The polyphony in Notes succeeds at both these levels, I suggest , because of the perfect control wielded by this author-autobiographer over the disparate voices she engenders. As an autobiographical literary work, Ginzburg's Notes thus embodies her artistic vision: "Art is always organization , a struggle with chaos and nonbeing and the transience of life.,,3 Although the siege of Leningrad was a particularly female experience, given that most able-bodied male citizens of the city were at the front, Ginzburg 's unusual blockade memoir asserts a common human experience when identity is stretched to the limit. By deliberately degendering and depersonalI Notable examples of the genre-both fiction and mem oir- include Anna Akhmatova 's "Rekviem"; Lidiia Chukovskaia's Sofia Petrovna, Spusk pod vodu, and Zapiski ob Al1lle Akhmatovoi; Evgeniia Ginzburg's Krtltoi mnrshrut; Nadezhda Mandel'sh tam's Vospomil1al1iia and Vtornia kl1iga; Irina Ratushinskaia's Seryi-tsvet Iwdezhdy; Varlam Shalamov 's Kolymskie rnsskazy; Andrei Siniavskii's Golas iz khom; and Alexander Solzhenitsyn 's V kruge pervo111 and Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha. 2 See Sarah Pratt's discussion of "the intersection of gender, genre, and culture" that gives rise to this foregrounding of the other in Russian women's autobiography ("Angels in the Stalinist House," 158-73). See also my Ph.D. dissertation that analyzes the pervasive privileging of the other in Russian women's autobiographical writing. More recently, Irina Paperno traces both the "vision of self and history" and the "writing strategies that connect self and history" in these accounts, including Ginzburg's Notes ("Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience, "577-610). 3 Ginzburg, 011 Psychological Prose, 10. Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman, eds. Bloom ington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008, 211 - 29. 212 MAlLiKA RAMDAS izing herself, and by tracing the common responses of all Leningraders-men and women, young and old, intellectuals and workers-to starvation and utter physical and emotional vulnerability, Ginzburg asserts a common humanity that transcends political or social categories like nationality, gender, age, occupation, or class.4 Lidiia Ginzburg (1902-90), one of Russia's preeminent literary scholars of the twentieth century and prolific author of works spanning a diverse range of genres, experienced the siege of Leningrad first handS In 1942, during the early part of the blockade, Ginzburg started recording her own and others' experiences of the siege in a journal that was the genesis of what would later become her Notes of a Blockade Person. Ginzburg added to and reshaped her early journals of the blockade numerous times after the war, as she would do with all her writings throughout her life. The final work, published for the first time only in 1984 in the literary journal Neva (The Neva), accordingly bears the following three dates, each separated from the next by approximately twenty years: 1942-1962-19836 The rather complicated publication history of Ginzburg's Notes prefigures , but does not entirely explain, the complex genre of the work. After its initial appearance in print, Ginzburg's Notes was published twice more during the author's lifetime. In 1987, it appeared (in the same version as the Neva text) as part of Ginzburg'S collection of theoretical articles, literary sketches, and memoiristic writings titled Literature in Search of Reality (Literatura v poiskakh real'nosti). In 1989, it was republished again, this time as part of another collection of Ginzburg'S diverse writings, A Person at Her/His Writing Desk (Chelovek za pis'mennym stolom). In the 1989 edition, the original text of Notes was followed by an additional section called"Around the Notes of a Blockade Person" ("Vokrug Zapisok blokadnogo cheloveka...